Day 10: Hollywood and UCLA
We were gently woken up by the “lovely” symphony of loud birds well before Dallas could get out a “wakey”. Our breakfast was gourmet as usual, including Great Value muffins from THE culinary institute of the world, Walmart.
Energized by our feast, we arrived at the iconic Griffith Observatory to plot our genius prank and held auditions for the screaming fans' roles. By a vote of popular opinion, our leading actors were Dexter, Phoebe-Kate, and Asher. Though the competition was stiff, these three brought just the right amount of chaos and excitement.
With our Avengers assembled, we headed down to the Chinese Theatre where we took a glance into pop culture history with famous handprints of celebrities, many none of us have heard of. Our prank proved to be successful when numerous tourists followed our crowd of Ian Obijo fans. Many asked us who he was and how famous he is, obviously from his role in “Top Gun” and we believe he is starring in the new Stranger Things season.
While we were busy matching our handprints to Will Smith’s and the Hunger Games cast, Tobi missed out on meeting Emma Watson (he was planning to go down on one knee). While some of us were doing our own little star treatment and getting pinkity drinketies, Jake stayed committed to the grind and bought a $20 day pass to LA Fitness (we respect the hustle). After exploring this iconic street, we cruised through 90210 and Beverly Hills like modern Beverly Hillbillies with all of our vehicles and southern accents. We lost count for how many famous people’s houses we saw and forgot the end total, but we expected there to be a LOT. In exchange for free parking, we gave the one and only La La Land souvineer store a boost to their sales.
For lunch, we enjoyed hand-pressed tortillas made from corn at a farm in Northern California, filled with delicious chicken slices and freshly shredded cheese and crisp fresh lettuce, harvested straight from our kitchen trailer garden. To end our meal on a high, we also had some homemade cookies from an Italian grandmother with some hand-twisted pretzels that tasted like they came straight from the factory. When we arrived at the one and only UCLA bookstore, we wandered around the gorgeous UCLA campus, passing many summer students hard at work. After our trip to the bookstore, we splurged so much I think we’re bleeding gold and blue now.
After UCLA, we arrived at our beautiful campsite at Lake Cachuma. As we waited for our chefs to finish curating our dinner, some indulged in multiple rounds of Spikeball (rules created by Dexter), line dancing and singing with our cooks, and an attempt to play volleyball, but the tree decided to play catch instead. For dinner, the cooks whipped up a glorious 5 star dinner of hotdogs, homemade mac and cheese from grandma’s recipe (the box kind..), and hand picked baked beans. While we had some free time after dinner, some took to the showers, but with 50 girls and 1.5 showers, it almost took as long as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. As our dishwashers graciously cleaned our messes, we all gathered for another sing-a-long with some fan favorites from our awesome musicians, Grant, Hollister, Jana, RJ, Bayla and a new addition… Tobi! We had a special guest who wanted to listen along… a scorpion which caused Ian to become our knight in shining armor and protected us from the wrath of the stinger. The cooks surprised us with a campfire and s'mores to end the fun-filled night.
